Sony says OLED HDTVs could see America stores this year depending on Japanese demand

Many home theater enthusiasts have high hopes for OLED technology -- hopes that not only will OLED HDTV sets require less power but that they also will be significantly thinner and provide better color reproduction and image quality.

Engadget is reporting that Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow revealed in talks this morning with journalists at the Sony Club in New York that, “OLED could come (to the U.S.) before the end of the year." The catch is that OLED HDTVs coming to America is dependent on the demand in Japan and panel supply. In other words if Sony’s OLED XEL-1 is a big hit in Japan, we won’t be seeing them this year in America.

Sony announced its 3mm thick XEL-1 OLED HDTV almost exactly one month ago to lustful stares from home theater fans around the world. The screen size was small at 11-inches and the price was high at about $1744 USD. The Sony XEL-1 OLED TV left many outside Japan reaching for their wallets only to be told the TV wasn’t available outside Japan.

Right, like putting R&D into building a game console that contains 8 separate cores, each with different functionality, requiring intimate knowledge of each core so as to develop functions unique to each one...riiiight, I wonder who thought that one up? Since when has the hardware mantra been to increase complexity by creating diversity among the dependent components of your tightly coupled hardware???

Now, I'll throw Sony a bone and say that you can't get it right every time. I like Sony as a company (I don't actually know why...PSP's were a gong show with their LCD's losing pixels, PS3 was designed so bizzarely that no developer wanted to make games for them, and they led the charge in their attempts to kill off their faithful with exploding batteries) and because they are championing Blu-Ray and OLED, I will like them for years to come.

quote: Right, like putting R&D into building a game console that contains 8 separate cores, each with different functionality, requiring intimate knowledge of each core so as to develop functions unique to each one...riiiight, I wonder who thought that one up?

Umm, Sony, Toshiba and IBM. You think you are smarter than them, collectively? Notice the complaints regarding programming the PS3 are that it's hard. Boofuckinghoo. There are programmers who complain, and then there are those who just do it.

NG: Sigma was beautiful, and ran pretty dang fast. Any complaints? R&C looks awesome. Resistance:FOM was pretty dang good for a launch title. EPIC's Mark Reign won't stop gushing. Infinity Ward seems to be doing ok, saying COD4 looks essentially identical. Lair, while a horrible game, had good graphics. Naughty Dog seems to be doing pretty good with Uncharted. Should I go on?

You want simple go play Cooking Mama on your Wii. This is grown people stuff here. Developers that are hunkering down are getting it done, even multiplat devs. Whiners and lazy devs are the ones you hear about on the internet.

I'm not saying that separating tasks onto separate cores is a foolish idea, it seems to be the current trend for most technologies. What I am saying is that the development tools and the skills required to work on the PS3 were on the far side of idiotic. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's good or that it's bad. For example, handling strings in C is one of the stupidest most redundant processes known to man. Does that make C awesome? Not at all.

On the other side of the equation we have Perl. Perl is a wet dream when it comes to handling strings. Lets assume that the technology and code that drove Perl was around when C was developed all those years back, and the people who created C decided to not use pattern matching and regular expressions for string searches, in addition to handling strings as arrays of characters instead of just making them a homogeneous unit. Would tell them they're moronic? I surely would. PS3 doesn't HAVE to be difficult to develop on, they just didn't lay it out or put enough forethought into making it easy to use and friendly to developers.

Xbox360 has decent graphics too, and yet everyone praises that platform for it's ease of use when developing. Just because developers complain something sucks doesn't mean they're just lazy. Some of us enjoy a challenge, so long as we're not wasting our time counting through arrays of characters instead of doing real code with proper tools.

Most of the 360 praise comes from PC developers who, unsurprisingly, are partial to the 360 because it's easier to port a PC title to the 360. For developers like Naughty Dog or the R&C guys who are developing a game for the PS3 from the get go, the architecture differences are much less of an issue and they are oftentimes are very complimentary of what the PS3 is allowing them to do. So it's funny, you see these guys who learned DirectX, don't see the equal initial difficulty and proprietary-ness of it, looking at a different system and coming up with all kinds of complaints, and essentially their argument becomes "why does Sony get to dictate their own platform when I already learned Microsoft's?"